Sharing the pride
The sometimes raucous prayer service for Deval Patrick at Jubilee Christian Church in Mattapan on Tuesday night, with its palpable sense of racial pride, underscored the historic nature of today's inauguration.
Patrick has chosen to acknowledge its uniqueness in his own way, by using for his swearing-in ceremony a bible that once provided solace to men captured for slavery. "This is my heritage. This is your heritage," he told his mostly black audience at Jubilee.
But there is one person who has a better sense than anyone of what today might feel like, and he will be looking on proudly at an occasion he was not sure he would witness.
L. Douglas Wilder made history in 1991 when he became the nation's first elected black governor, winning Virginia's highest office. Around noon today there will be a second.
"To tell you the truth, I didn't think it would be this long before there was another one," Wilder said by telephone earlier this week.
Wilder, 75, is now the mayor of Richmond. He served one term as governor, from 1990 to 1994; in Virginia, governors cannot be reelected. He was elected mayor last year.
"I know how it's going to feel," said Wilder. "I'm going to feel proud and grateful that I had the opportunity to watch it. This is the first and closest possibility we've had since I was elected."
When he became governor, Wilder says , he thought a door had been kicked down. That didn't prove to be the case for a variety of reasons.
"One, you have to have a candidate, one whose qualifications don't just speak to race. Secondly, it requires a great deal of effort and resources. [Patrick] was able to put together the kind of structure and machine that people want to be a part of."
It also takes, he said, a willingness to buck opposition. "People would always tell me it wasn't my time" to run, he said. "I used to tell them to take a blank piece of paper and write down when my time is."
Wilder's path to the governor's office was more conventional than Patrick's. He was Virginia's first black state senator, and when he was elected lieutenant governor he became the first black to win a statewide election in the South since Reconstruction.
When he ran for governor, he led comfortably in most polls right down to the end. Despite that, his margin of victory was 0 .1 percent. That mirrored his previous statewide race, in which his final vote was far less than polls suggested it would be. Pollsters eventually coined the term "the Wilder effect" to describe the sometimes substantial gap between the poll numbers of black politicians and their electoral results.
I mentioned to Wilder that Patrick's margin of victory, particularly in the Democratic primary, had surprised many observers who didn't believe a black candidate could possibly win a statewide race by more than 20 points, no matter what the polls said. Wilder said he had been surprised, too.
"I warned him, you've got to watch those polls," Wilder chuckled. "But I think people are becoming less resistant to saying, 'I'm going to vote for the person whether it's a woman, or gay, or whatever.' There's more openness -- but we've still got to watch it."
Wilder said voters -- whether in Massachusetts or Virginia -- really don't care about making history. "To the average voter, making history is good, but they want to know how that will help them with transportation and housing and healthcare. I do think that this widens the door and that people won't view his election as an aberration, as people thought mine was."
Wilder and Patrick talk occasionally, and Wilder said he had offered advice. "I told him to watch the money -- where it comes from, on whom it's spent, and who makes the decisions on what's done. That's how you're going to be judged."
He had one other piece of advice. "I have a saying: I don't succumb to flattery because if I did criticism would crush me. Expect criticism, but don't succumb to it."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 